History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
GORE VIDALThe first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.
More Gore Vidal Quotes
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There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
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To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
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We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
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One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
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You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right – constitutional right.
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The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
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From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.
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The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
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On September 5, 1774, forty-five of the weightiest colonial men formed the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia.
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
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I remember the Bond movies when I was a child. They were silent then.
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The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
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A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.
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I’m always an optimist!
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Does one ever read a politician’s books?
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All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
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What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
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To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
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The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.
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It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.
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The unfed mind devours itself.
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The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
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Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to ‘serious’ drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone.
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A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
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I’m not paranoid, no. I’m different in that I have enemies. Very real ones.
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I never said I was gay, because I don’t think anyone is.
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